BIOL 103 Chapter Notes -Carrying Capacity, Parasitism, Demographic Transition
27 Sep 2013
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Document Summary
Contents: understanding populations, demography, how populations grow, human population growth. A population can be defined as a group of interbreeding individuals occupying the same area at the same time. Population ecology is the study of how populations grow and what factors promote and limit growth. To study populations, we need to use demography, the study of birth rates, death rates, age distributions and the sizes of populations. Population density: the numbers of organisms in a given unit area. Ecologists use many different methods to quantify population density. Or animals are trap-happy, especially if the traps are baited with food. We can also count pelts, catch per unit in fishery, pellet numbers, chorusing, or ground covered by plants. Individuals within a population can show different patterns of spatial dispersion, they can be clustered together or spread out to varying degrees: can be clumped, uniform, or random. Clumped: most common dispersion pattern likely because resources tend to be clustered in nature.
